The John Russell Fearn Science Fiction Megapack

by John Russell Fearn

Kil-Dio turned aside with Ri-Dathan and studied the elaborate computations built up by the clicking mathematical machines. In silence he checked the exact position of 73,000,000-mile-distant Rinia, together with the path the heterodyning beam and tube of force would have to take through space.

  His stalked eyes turned and regarded the meters on the solar energy potential scate; they registered 86,000,000-volts potential energy. Almost in silence the energy-storing apparatus continued working under 30,000-volt pressure, catching on its endless series of brushes a constant flow of charges directly from the Sun itself.

  Satisfied, Kil-Dlo slid his body along the insulated floor, moved by degrees to the region of the immense switchboard, nerve center of the mammoth machinery frowning around him. Delicately his quivering body tentacle closed a master switch, to release an instant babble of din.

  Energies, terrific in their scope and power, leashed though they were, burst suddenly amidst the machines. The yellow-lighted laboratory became bathed in quivering, pale-violet flame, began to reek with ozone. Shivering purple threads lashed themselves like living things between the anode and cathode globes. With a crashing, crackling roar the energy blasted from them into the midst of swiftly rotating copper balls and whirling, humming governors. Tubes flared green; dynamos shrieked a deafening whine of song. In the distance, a group of gigantic turbines spun before the onrush of synthetic water, shot through with rippling filigrees of amethyst color. Bolt after bolt of energy slammed into the transforming chamber of the energy-projecting machinery, hurled thence through the cables to the complicated apparatus atop the external tower.

  Kil-Dio squatted motionless before the switchboard, stalked eyes jerking incessantly from meter to meter, gauge to gauge, avidly following slender threads of red that quivered to a danger mark and then dropped swiftly as he closed switches with methodical movements.

  The laboratory began to quiver with the intense, exultant thunder of that energy. Stifling heat beat along its length, but the Venusians were accustomed to that. They were not watching Kil-Dio’s intense efforts. Their attention was fixed alternately on two screens—the one giving a view of the tower outside by X-ray wave transmitters, and the other a view of Rinia, kept constantly in position by the clockwork motors.

  The heterodyning wave working from the complex apparatus in the center of the copper hoop was invisible, only the jerking meter needles testified to its light-fast progress across the gulf of space. But within a few minutes there burst forth from that enormous copper circle a sudden dazzling lavender beam, stabbing into the star-dusted sky until it was lost in utter remoteness. The sandy, arid plain below became bathed in the alien glare of electrical fire. Dust storms gathered and whirled, eddied into sudden violence by the tremendous disturbance in the atmosphere.

  The Venusians watched breathlessly, steeling themselves against the glaring, flashing riot of self-inflicted thunder and lightning. Their gaze was now fixed on the Rinian spacevizor. Since the tube of energy was traveling across the void at the speed of light it would take some 6.5 minutes to cover that gulf of nearly 73,000,000 miles.

  The din remained constant; the energy-tube flared in unvarying pale purple fire from the copper ring on the tower— Seconds crept into minutes—three—four—five—

  Six! A low sound, the equivalent of a sigh, passed from the Venusians as they saw that the gravity-heterodyning beam, slightly in advance of the force tunnel, had arrived. It struck that thriving, green planet clean in the center of its principal Venusward ocean.

  The result was immediate—and cataclysmic! With gravity suddenly rendered of no account over a thousand mile area, all things within that area ceased to hold together. Ships caught in its midst flew apart, the very atoms pf their constitution no longer obeying normal attractive laws. They mushroomed out, visible on the mirror as blurs on the ocean.

  The sea itself writhed and tumbled as though suddenly stirred by titanic submarine forces. A vast tidal wave shot to the zenith—and at that identical second the tube of force struck squarely over the area, a pale, enormously distended haze of lavender enveloping three-quarters of the ocean.

  Degravitated, helpless to hold onto their native world, both sea and air thundered in a thousand incredible furies and spuming cataracts toward the vacuum of the force-tube area. The tube drew a hole in the ocean with the mighty force of a super suction-pump, drove deep down to the bed of the ocean—but there the range limit of the heterodyner ceased. On the ocean bed the law of gravity was still normal.

  The whole face of Rinia changed, became covered with a tempest of unimaginable force. The clouds thickened, whirled madly, obscuring the vision below from sight, Only that purple beam probing relentlessly through the murk told how successful the scientists of Venus had been.

  Those in the laboratory turned their attention away from the murky enigma and instead searched their exterior vizor. They had not long to wait.

  Abruptly, the clear flickerless intensity of that empurpled hoop atop the tower was blurred by the arrival of the first conglomerated mass of air and water from Rinia, literally thrust through the hoop like water from a hose nozzle. A raging, gushing tumult of uncounted quintillions of ice shards slammed into the mountain range and rebounded in a mighty avalanche, whirled thicker and ever thicker, black against the stars. In a few seconds the entire view of the beam was obliterated by tumbling vortices of desperately twisting atmosphere and water vapor.

  The din of a thousand Niagras and tempests reached to the ears of the buried scientists with a noise like distant thunder. The smashing of their external vizor by the impounded fury of waters and cyclone deprived them of viewing the consummation of their masterpiece. They could only guess—

  There was nothing they could do but wait—through days, through weeks if need be, until Nature herself formed the balance and allowed them to take their first survey of a rejuvenated world.

  III

  Viranicus Petlo, of Mars, was deep underground when the cataclysm came. It was no coincidence that found him there—his work as an electrical and mining engineer kept him deep underground most of his life, in company with the scientists who represented his colleagues from the Mining and Radio Association.

  Like the rest of his race, Petlo was massive in appearance, well over seven feet tall, broad-shouldered, yellow-eyed, with the flat face and broad nostrils of the true Martian. Otherwise, he was not very unlike an Earthling of the present day.

  He was testing a seam of ore when he received the first warning of danger. The alarm clanged noisily down thé long, cold-light illumined tunnel. Figures came flying helter-skelter toward him; a babble of voices smote his ears.

  The deep rumbling and booming of external thunders growled above the shouting. Fissures gaped and leapt avidly up the tunnel sides. Lumps of rock clattered down from the roof.

  Petlo gripped one of his comrades as he came gaspingly up. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  The man gulped for breath arid slanted his yellow head toward the screaming radio at the far end of the tunnel. “Earthquake or something on the surface! Sort of cyclone, tidal wave and landslide. Can’t quite understand it. Better stay down here until it stops. I think the shaft will hold.”

  Petlo studied it grimly. “In thirty minutes of this vibration it will come through,” he said finally. “I’m heading for the surface.”

  “Don’t be a fool, man!” the other cried hoarsely. “The conditions are far worse up there than they are here. I’ve just been through to the surface by radiophone and things are so bad I—”

  “I’ve got a wife and son to think about!” Petlo retorted. “You can do what you like!”

  He wasted no further time on words. On swift feet he raced down the tunnel’s length to the accompaniment of the growling and creaking of tortured, slowly cracking walls. A massive piece of ceiling dislodged itself not a foot behind his flying form. With a set face he raced along the last stretch of the tunnel and gained the elevator shaft.

  Clearly t
o his ears down the 400-foot bore came the roaring and whining of a thousand furies, the scream of a super wind, the hammering madness of a raging atmosphere. A momentary frown crossed his dogged face. The thing was utterly abnormal. Storms of such extreme severity were practically unknown on this world of Jondol.

  A deeper roaring suddenly replaced that of the wind. It rose louder and louder, developed into a scream that mingled oddly with the screech if voices— Faster—faster! Only just in time Petlo flung himself away as the shaft cage came slamming down in a cloud of dust and struggling, dying figures.

  For perhaps ten seconds he stood appalled, then realizing he could do nothing, he vaulted onto the wreckage, seized the framework of the shaft wall and began to ease his body upward inch by inch.

  It was a ghastly, nightmare ascent. The shaft quivered incessantly, more than once threatened to fling him down the ever-widening distance to the floor below. His fingers were bleeding, his body drenched in sweat, but little by little, finger and toe, he went upward, ever upward, only pausing once at the sound of vast concussions from the depths. He realized he had been right; the lower shafts had caved in.

  He fought up the last hundred feet with brittle muscles and, more dead than alive, crawled over the edge of the shaft and lay prone, not daring to lift his head over the projecting rim into the screaming, insane tumult around him.

  Dazed, incredulous, he watched a sky that was thick with boiling, swirling clouds, tearing toward the sea not five miles away. Buildings, trees, whole landscapes were shifting and whirling toward that unseen spot. It seemed to be centered somewhere over the ocean itself. More he could not discern. He felt his skin prickling with the sensation of electrical discharges; he could feel that his hair was crimped.

  The only thought in his mind now was for his young wife, Nidia, and their son. What had happened to them? What could have— He began to crawl on hands and knees, lashed by a tempest of inconceivable power, drenched in battering rains, his way lighted by flashing bolts of insane thunder and lightning.

  He crawled two miles through the thick of a seething hell—another mile and he’d be at the spot occupied by his isolated home on the outskirts of the city of Kilanton. As he struggled onward he caught glimpses of the city’s lofty spires and edifices tumbling and falling wildly before the onslaught. Other parts were utterly washed away in moving landslides as suddenly deviated rivers frothed and foamed seaward.

  Still Viranicus Petlo did not understand. His mind was a whirling mass of tortured emotions. He crawled the last mile on knees that were cut and bleeding, clawed with fingers that had long since lost their feeling, listened like a dulled, hunted animal to the screams and shouts of the others of his fellow men and women as they were caught up in the hurricane and hurled helpless through the screaming air.

  Stupidly, weighted down with the rain, Petlo pawed through the crumbled mass that had been his home, until it suddenly came to him what he was doing, where he was. With a sudden mad energy he began to hurl stones and boulders from before him, diving deep down into the debris, searching for the crumpled, maimed bodies that had been his beloved wife and son.

  For thirty minutes he searched, defying the snatching fingers of the cyclone and the searing thunderbolts. Then suddenly he stopped his activities when his powerful hands closed round a ring of metal. It pierced his confusion that it led to the cellar of his home. Could it be possible that Nidia— Madly he tore on the ring, lifted the metal square upward and stared beneath with yellow eyes that were insanely glad. Dimly visible were the sprawled figures of a slim woman and a boy, unconscious.

  With shaking legs Petlo went down the steps into the cellar, pulled the lid down after him and bolted it securely. Slowly, gently, he felt around in the dark and lifted the limp bodies in his arms, caressed them, thanked the Providence that had led them to hide down here.

  In grim-faced silence he listened to the screaming insanity above—the rumbling and growling of a world in sudden death agonies. He listened and listened, through hours that were numberless—

  * * * *

  Eight days and nights of sheer, unparalleled horror came and went before the ghastly onslaught upon Mars showed signs of ceasing. Then, at long last, the wrenching and straining of a flogged world began to ease up—the titanic winds abated; the quaking and quivering of the quakes subsided into an aching, placid calm.

  Half conscious, tortured by hunger and thirst, Viranicus Petlo began to move. His wife and son who had been conscious for part of the time had now relapsed again. The air in the cellar was stifling; the ventilators must have become partly blocked.

  Petlo crawled to the trapdoor and pushed on it. He experienced but little difficulty in raising it—not many of the boulders he had moved from it in the first place had replaced themselves.

  It was day, and the light stung his eyes for a moment. A day such as he had thought could never happen in his lifetime. Cold, biting wind, incredibly rarefied, cut around him. The sky was cloudless, of an intensely dark blue shade that spoke at once of a thinned atmosphere. The Sun hung at the zenith.

  Shivering in his thin clothes, Petlo gazed blankly on a scene of profoundest desolation from which all traces of the things he had known and loved had apparently been blasted. Kilanton City was a shambles of smashed and tumbled stone. Hundreds of crushed bodies lay in every imaginable posture. Not a thing stirred, save that in the far distance a ragged flag had freakishly escaped disaster and stood waving drearily now in the icy wind.

  Petlo stared out to where the sea should have been, but there was no sea—only a vast, incredible, yawning desert, puddled here and there where slight condensation had occurred. In the midst of it, rotted, unexpected, lay the hulks of ships that had sunk in a forgotten time.

  “Gone!” Petlo whispered at last. “All gone! Our seas—our peoples—our progress. Everything that goes to make a world. But why?” He dumbly sought the heavens—then a twinge in his stomach and the dryness of his throat reminded him that food and drink were needed, and quickly.

  Getting to his feet he staggered toward the major bulk of the city. Here and there buildings were standing—skeletal, parts of the interiors left untouched. There must be food somewhere—tabloid food perhaps. And water! There must be water somewhere. There had to be—

  * * * *

  Viranicus Petlo found food and water—quite a fair supply of it—in one portion of the city. Once he had revived Nidia and the boy, Ladima, they all moved to that portion and made their home in the basement of what had formerly been an enormous, multiple store. In his subsequent ramblings Petlo also found parts of the Mining and Radio Association Building still intact.

  There were tools, precious oxygen and hydrogen cylinders still undamaged, machines, electrical equipment, and a hundred and one useful devices that came readily to his fingers. He made the store basement airtight against the frigid night cold and fixed up a crude, but satisfactory, system of waste-air disposal, mingled the oxygen with the hydrogen gases to provide water when necessary.

  That was at first, but at the end of five weeks others came, bringing their children—others from every walk of life—engineers, scientists, laborers, miners, each of them bringing their own particular discoveries resurrected from the ruins. Little by little a basement city grew up in the ruins of shattered Kilanton, ruled over unquestioned by Petlo himself.

  But Petlo had changed. His whole nature had undergone a metamorphosis. The first realization of the hideous wrong that had been done his beloved world were burning in his brain.

  “It was deliberate! Deliberate!”

  He made that passionate declaration on an evening when Halvan, a chemist, his closest new-found friend, called upon him. Halvan was a quiet sort of man, less fiery than Petlo, and devoted to the wife and young daughter who now sat beside him in the glow of the roughly erected cold-light bulbs.

  “Somebody or something stole our water and atmosphere!” Petlo flamed, pacing angrily up and down.

  “In that you ar
e correct,” Halvan agreed thoughtfully. “During my recent wanderings I explored the Eastern Observatory. Part of the big reflector is still intact, so I made use of it—studied the heavens for a possible explanation of the recent catastrophe. And I found it! Jalva, the second planet from the Sun, now has an atmosphere of considerable density where formerly there was none! Clouds completely obscure its surface. Formerly, it was reckoned as an almost dead world.”

  “Jalva!” Petlo cried, halting in his stride. “You mean then that—”

  “I mean that it is probable that by a process of super-science the inhabitants of Jalva, whom we thought nonexistent, robbed us in order to rejuvenate their own world. Our science is not as good as theirs, and therefore—” Halvan shrugged moodily.

  “We still have rocket ships which can be repaired,” Petlo said fiercely. “Can we not band ourselves together and raid these thieves? Destroy them?”

  “Our little band against an entire race of super-scientists?” Halvan shook his graying head doubtfully. “I don’t think so, Petlo. There is nothing we can do but repair our shattered fortunes as best we can. At the best we can only wait for the end.”

  “And a pretty depressing idea that is!” Petlo retorted. “The point is for us to revenge, not to take this lying down—”

  “But Halvan is right, Viran,” interrupted Nidia quietly. “Just what can we do—we few on a world rapidly dying as the last air thins out? Our children will perhaps live their lives through in this underground place, and then— And then the world will be dead.”

  Petlo did not reply. Scowling with thought, he seated himself and began to ponder, thinking, planning, his whole vigorous being concentrated on one end—vengeance!

  IV

  The complete metamorphosis of Viranicus Petlo was a slow but resolute thing. From the first he took command, was the leader of the remaining people in their constant expeditions amidst the shattered ruins of Kilanton.

  Little by little, through tireless searching, they began to unearth more and mere scientific devices, or else the necessary materials for making them. Petlo, driven by one profound obsession for avenging his world, worked mysteriously toward an end.